Doubling the acquisition rate by spatial multiplexing of holograms in coherent sparse coded aperture correlation holography

Single Shot Lensless Interferenceless Phase Imaging of Biochemical Samples Using Synchrotron near Infrared Beam

Phase imaging of biochemical samples has been demonstrated for the first time at the Infrared Microspectroscopy (IRM) beamline of the Australian Synchrotron using the usually discarded near-IR (NIR) region of the synchrotron-IR beam. The synchrotron-IR beam at the Australian Synchrotron IRM beamline has a unique fork shaped intensity distribution as a result of the gold coated extraction mirror shape, which includes a central slit for rejection of the intense X-ray beam. The resulting beam configuration makes any imaging task challenging. For intensity imaging, the fork shaped beam is usually tightly focused to a point on the sample plane followed by a pixel-by-pixel scanning approach to record the image. In this study, a pinhole was aligned with one of the lobes of the fork shaped beam and the Airy diffraction pattern was used to illuminate biochemical samples. The diffracted light from the samples was captured using a NIR sensitive lensless camera. A rapid phase-retrieval algorithm was applied to the recorded intensity distributions to reconstruct the phase information. The preliminary results are promising to develop multimodal imaging capabilities at the IRM beamline of the Australian Synchrotron.

Temporal super-resolution high-speed holographic video recording based on switching reference lights and angular multiplexing in off-axis digital holography

We develop a temporal super-resolution high-speed holographic video recording method based on the angular multiplexing in off-axis digital holography that can achieve an acquisition rate greater than the frame rate of image sensors. We realize a high-speed switching of reference lights with different incident angles using two acousto-optic modulators. We successfully double the frame rate of the hologram recording using a rotating circular protractor and demonstrate its practical application in compressed gas flow injection; we achieve a frame rate of 175,000 fps using a high-speed image sensor triggered at 87,500 Hz.

High-quality interferenceless coded aperture correlation holography with optimized high SNR holograms

Motivated by the key role of point spread function in an imaging system, we propose an interferenceless coded aperture correlation holographic (I-COACH) technology with low speckle and high energy efficiency annular sparse coded phase mask (CPM) as system pupil to improve imaging performance. In the proposed method, a modified Gerchberg-Saxton (GS) algorithm is proposed to obtain a low speckle and high energy efficiency annular sparse CPM and to suppress speckle and increase the intensity of the holograms. Therefore, the randomly distributed amplitude in the bandwidth of the GS algorithm is replaced by the annular amplitude to determine the spatial position, and the band-limited random phase and quadratic phase are used as the initial phase to approximately meet band-limited conditions; meanwhile, in the iterative process of the algorithm, appropriate constraints are imposed on the information within and outside the band limit. All are used for obtaining the CPM with low speckle and high energy efficiency. Therefore, the proposed technique here is coined as low speckle I-COACH owing to the characteristics of CPM and imaging performances. The experimental results show that, under the same experimental conditions, the proposed method can obtain holograms with low speckle and intensity enhancement of about 8%, and further improve the quality of reconstructed images due to the improvement signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the holograms. The proposed method provides a powerful reference method for further expanding the I-COACH system to the field of low-intensity optical signals detection and imaging.

Phase contrast-based phase retrieval: a bridge between qualitative phase contrast and quantitative phase imaging by phase retrieval algorithms

In the last five decades, iterative phase retrieval methods have drawn a lot of interest across the research community as a non-interferometric approach to recover quantitative phase distributions from one (or more) intensity measurement. However, in cases where a unique solution does exist, these methods often require oversampling and high computational resources, which limit the use of this approach in important applications. On the other hand, phase contrast methods are based on a single camera exposure, but provide only a qualitative description of the phase; thus, they are not useful for applications in which the quantitative phase description is needed. In this Letter, we establish a combined approach based on the two above-mentioned methods to overcome their respective drawbacks. We show that a modified phase retrieval algorithm easily converges to the correct solution by initializing the algorithm with a phase-induced intensity measurement, namely with a phase contrast image of the examined object. Accurate quantitative phase measurements for both binary and continuously varying phase objects are demonstrated to support the suggested system as a single-shot quantitative phase contrast microscope.

Lensless Three-Dimensional Quantitative Phase Imaging Using Phase Retrieval Algorithm

Quantitative phase imaging (QPI) techniques are widely used for the label-free examining of transparent biological samples. QPI techniques can be broadly classified into interference-based and interferenceless methods. The interferometric methods which record the complex amplitude are usually bulky with many optical components and use coherent illumination. The interferenceless approaches which need only the intensity distribution and works using phase retrieval algorithms have gained attention as they require lesser resources, cost, space and can work with incoherent illumination. With rapid developments in computational optical techniques and deep learning, QPI has reached new levels of applications. In this tutorial, we discuss one of the basic optical configurations of a lensless QPI technique based on the phase-retrieval algorithm. Simulative studies on QPI of thin, thick, and greyscale phase objects with assistive pseudo-codes and computational codes in Octave is provided. Binary phase samples with positive and negative resist profiles were fabricated using lithography, and a single plane and two plane phase objects were constructed. Light diffracted from a point object is modulated by phase samples and the corresponding intensity patterns are recorded. The phase retrieval approach is applied for 2D and 3D phase reconstructions. Commented codes in Octave for image acquisition and automation using a web camera in an open source operating system are provided.

Coded aperture correlation holographic microscope for single-shot quantitative phase and amplitude imaging with extended field of view

Recently, a method of recording holograms of coherently illuminated three-dimensional scene without two-wave interference was demonstrated. The method is an extension of the coded aperture correlation holography from incoherent to coherent illumination. Although this method is practical for some tasks, it is not capable of imaging phase objects, a capability that is an important benefit of coherent holography. The present work addresses this limitation by using the same type of coded phase masks in a modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer. We show that by several comparative parameters, the coded aperture-based phase imaging is superior to the equivalent open aperture-based method. As an additional merit of the coded aperture approach, a framework for increasing the system's field of view is formulated and demonstrated for both amplitude and phase objects. The combination of high sensitivity quantitative phase microscope with increased field of view in a single camera shot holographic apparatus, has immense potential to serve as the preferred tool for examination of transparent biological tissues.